Tag Archives: Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies

The fifth annual meeting of S.NET, the Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies (the call for proposals was featured in my Mar. 6, 2013 posting), is being held Oct. 27 – 29, 2013 at Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts.

I found a draft copy of the meeting’s programme here, The 2013 Theme is: Innovation, Responsibility, and Sustainable Development, I see the plenary speaker for the meeting’s opening session on Sunday, Oct. 27, 2013 from 6 pm to 7:30 pm is Dr. Andrew Maynard,Director of the University of Michigan Risk Science Center (formerly Chief Science Advisor for the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies hosted by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars,e etc). He will be speaking on the theme of Technology Innovation and the New Social Responsibility.

The next two days (Oct. 28 – 29, 2013) look to be packed and here’s sampling of what attendees can expect (Note: I’ve had to reformat this material dramatically),

Innovating for Personalised Medicine (8:30 – 10 am, Oct. 28. 2013)

Federica Lucivero, University of Tilburg;
Marianne Boenink, University of Twente Living up to the P of promises: Innovation for 4P medicine

Kathryn de Ridder-Vignone,
Arizona State Univ. *The Futurescape City Tours: Material Deliberation as Public Engagement

Renata Hejduk and Darren
Petrucci, Arizona State U. Nano and the City: A Hyper-collaborative Design Studio Environment Exploring Future Scenarios on the Impact of Nanotechnologies upon the City of Phoenix in the mid 21st Century.

Julia Silvia Guivant, Federal U. of
Santa Catarina Certification of GMOs and non-GMOs: the implications of the search for sustainability and responsible technological innovation

*Gregor Wolbring, U. of Calgary Analysis of the linkage between science and technology advancements and sustainable development goals: Introducing Eco-ableism as a conceptual framework

Louis-Etienne Pigeon, U. Laval Nanotechnologies and the Land Ethic in the context of sustainable development: what progress? which objective?

Rodrigo Cortes-Lobos, Univ. de
Talca A decade of the US Public Research Agenda in Agrifood Nanotechnology: It is ready to Contribute toward a more Sustainable Development?

etc.

I have starred (*) a few items. The first being, *The Futurescape City Tours: Material Deliberation as Public Engagement in the Film and Discussion session on Oct. 28, 2013. This is a public engagement programme which seems to have been developed at Arizona State University and is currently being imported into other jurisdictions including Edmonton, Alberta as per the Nanotechnology and the Community project at the University of Alberta,

2) Futurescape Cities Tour (October – November 2013) – A series of engagements and walking tours that encourage public participants to explore innovation and nanotechnology in relation to the city. These tours promote communication between publics, scientists, and business leaders as a means of jointly considering innovation and development plans in relation to desirable visions of the future of the City. In collaboration with research teams in the US, these tours will coincide with similar events being planned in Phoenix AR, St. Paul MN, Portland OR, Durham NC, Springfield MA, and Washington DC.

The second starred session is *Policy and Nanotechnology Development in Brazil and that’s because the Brazilian congress just voted down a motion to regulate nanotechnology as per a Sept. 9, 2013 news item on SciDevNet (Note: Links have been removed).

The Brazilian Congress has rejected a bill that aimed to introduce labelling on all food, drugs and cosmetics containing nanostructures, arguing that it was alarmist and that there was no scientific basis for warning people about nanotechnology in products.

The move is the latest rebuff to such regulation, even as the country spearheads multimillion-dollar nanotechnology programmes and experts argue that better oversight of this new technology could benefit both industry and consumers.

A Senate report on the rejected bill said that the proposed labelling could have been interpreted as a “warning” even on products improved by nanotechnology, potentially causing losses to companies that have invested in improving their products through this technology.

Consequently, there could be a fall in research and development investment in the sector, which would undermine national investment into nanotechnology such as the National Nanotechnology Programme, a multimillion-dollar initiative launched in 2005, and its extension the Brazilian Nanotechnology Initiative launched last month (19 August) that is worth 440 million reals (approximately US$186 million) by the end of 2014.

The bill’s demise marks the second failure to regulate the fast-growing sector: in 2005, a more ambitious bill, with provisions for a national policy on nanotechnology, including labelling, risk assessment and other decisions, was evaluated by the industry, science, and finance committees from Congress’s Chamber of Deputies, which found the field to be at too early a stage for legislation.

*The third and last session I’ve starred is Gregor Wolbring’s (University of Calgary) Analysis of the linkage between science and technology advancements and sustainable development goals: Introducing Eco-ableism as a conceptual framework I have mentioned Gregor a number of times here in the context of human enhancement, most recently in a Jan. 30, 2013 posting. As his session integrates his concept of ableism and sustainability there is a description of ableism in my August 30, 2011 posting and of course, there’s always Gregor’s blog or you can check Gregor’s academic page for more information about ableism.

The fifth annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies (S.NET) will be taking place Oct. 27 – 30, 2013 at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. The call for proposals was sent out yesterday, Mar. 5, 2013,

Proposals are now being solicited for the 2013 annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies (S.NET), to be held at Northeastern University, Boston, October 27-30. At this point we are open to all suggestions, ranging from standard papers, presentation, and posters to ideas for concurrent workshops, plenary sessions, and special roundtables.

Our theme for the 2013 meeting is Innovation, Responsibility, and Sustainable Development. Boston is a literal hub for innovation, and the theme fits in well with the region’s traditions and current strengths in a wide range of technologies. Moreover, as we have stressed from its origins, the Society seeks to advance critical reflection from various perspectives on developments in a broad range of new and emerging fields, including, but not limited to, nanoscale science and engineering, biotechnology, synthetic biology, cognitive science and geo-engineering.

Proposals can be submitted until May 1 via the S.NET Submission Portal. The Program Committee will assess all proposals and respond by June 15 [2013].

You can read the full call announcement here in a Mar. 2, 2013 posting on the Nanotechnology and Society Research Group (NSRG) blog. The NSRG is located at Northeastern University.

I very much enjoyed and appreciated the 2012 S.NET (Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies) conference in Enschede, Netherlands from Oct. 22-25, 2012. It was my first nano-themed conference and I suffered from an embarrassment of riches so what follows is just a sliver of the available presentation offerings and my opinions.

I’m sad to say that I have no sensible notes from the opening plenary (‘Emerging technologies — From Technology Push to Societal Pull’ with Dave Blank, Christos Tokamanis, and Pat Mooney on a panel moderated by Arie Rip) largely due to the fact that I’d been travelling continuously for about 15 or 16 hours by then and had trouble absorbing information. The next day was much better.

Public risk perceptions: Mary Collins talking about the Nanopants attack (protest) and about scientists’ approaches to public communication about nanotechnology risks ; Frederico Neresini discussing perceptions in Italy; and Craig Cormick providing more details about the nanosunscreen debacle in Australia.

Mary Collins (University of California at Santa Barbara) presented her work analyzing the various points of view from the science and non-science communities regarding discussions of public risk. She noted there is still concern that the GMO (genetically modified organisms) movement could happen again with nanotechnology and scientists are devoutly interested in avoiding this circumstance. By and large, most scientists want to promote some discussion about risks as a means of avoiding a ‘GMO disaster’ although there is no universal agreement as to which groups/social communities should be apprised. Some scientists favour elite groups only while others prefer a more universal dissemination of information. Collins noted that it is very difficult to find any documentation of scientists espousing the belief that communication of risk should be nonexistent. One audience member noted that a policy of suppressing discussion could be inferred by the lack of media coverage for an activist protest known as the ‘Nanopants attack’. Wired Magazine appears to have been the only media outlet to have covered the event by featuring a June 10, 2005 article by Howard Lovy,

On a chilly Chicago afternoon in early May, environmental activists sauntered into the Eddie Bauer store on Michigan Avenue, headed to the broad storefront windows opening out on the Magnificent Mile and proceeded to take off their clothes.

The strip show aimed to expose more than skin: Activists hoped to lay bare growing allegations of the toxic dangers of nanotechnology. The demonstrators bore the message in slogans painted on their bodies, proclaiming “Eddie Bauer hazard” and “Expose the truth about nanotech,” among other things, in light of the clothing company’s embrace of nanotech in its recent line of stain-resistant “nanopants.”

Frederico Neresini, University of Padua (Italy), discussed some of his work polling for attitudes toward nanotechnology risk and his tentative hypothesis that the more public debate there is on the topic, the more important trustworthiness becomes. Trust was discussed many times and in many contexts at the conference and seemed to be an emergent theme.

Craig Cormick, Australian Dept. of Innovation, discussed the surprising results of a recent poll in Australia which showed that 13% of the population doesn’t use any sunscreen due to concern about nanoscale ingredients (this finding was mentioned at more length in my Feb. 9, 2012 posting). He also noted that he was on the receiving end of some very personal attacks once this information was released. I hadn’t realized it was coincidental but, almost simultaneously, there was another project (analyzing sunscreens available on the Australian market for nanoscale ingredients) where they announced findings of many more sunscreens with nanoscale ingredients than were labelled as such. There weren’t many new details for public consumption but it was interesting to hear a first hand account. Cormick did offer a provocative idea during the session, ‘apply the precautionary principle to your risk messages’.

Chris Groves of Cardiff University (Wales) offered a lunchtime plenary talk titled, ‘Horizons of care: from future imaginaries to responsible innovation’. We were treated to a discussion of philosophy which featured Hegel and Deleuze amongst others. What I found most intriguing were Groves’ contentions that ‘vision’ is a problematic metaphor; that living in an ‘age of innovation’ means living in an ‘age of surprises'; and that science interprets the world by looking into the past. His quote from Hannah Arendt, “What we make remakes us” brought home the notion that there is a feedback loop and that science and invention are not unidirectional pursuits, i.e., we do not create the world and stand apart from it; the world we create, in turn, recreates us.

I was particularly taken with one of his last comments, ‘mapping as a metaphor for colonizing the future’. I’ve long been interested by the frequency of ‘mapping’ as a metaphor in scientific pursuits (mapping the genome, amongst many others). His comment reminded me that the great mapping bonanzas are associated with ‘colonizing’ various continents.

A big thank you is due to

US National Science Foundation,

the University of California at Santa Barbara (Valerie Kuan and Barbara Herr Harthorn),

the Canadian Academy of Independent Scholars,

Simon Fraser University,

Luinda Bleackley,

Teresa McDowell,

Zoey Ryan,

Susan Baxter,

Helen Dewar,

Debora Gordon, and

Doug Setter

all of whose financial support helped me get to the conference. I am deeply grateful.

I want to thank the organizers for a sumptuous conference not only in content but also in execution. They even managed to cater most of our meals, which made life ever so much easier. In particular, I want to thank Marcia Clifford and Evelien Rietberg of the local organizing committee for their patience and help as I fumbled about on my arrival.

Part 2: Yet again, I discover information about Canadian nanotechnology efforts through European sources.

ETA Nov. 1, 2012: I made a minor grammatical correction in the section about Chris Groves’ talk and I should mention that I never did quite grasp the relationship of ‘care’ to the concepts he presented.

My proposal, Zombies, brains, collapsing boundaries, and entanglements, for the 4th annual S.NET (Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies) conference was accepted. Mentioned in my Feb. 9, 2012 posting, the conference will be held at the University of Twente (Netherlands) from Oct. 22 – 25, 2012.

Here’s the abstract I provided,

The convergence between popular culture’s current fascination with zombies and their appetite for human brains (first established in the 1985 movie, Night of the Living Dead) and an extraordinarily high level of engagement in brain research by various medical and engineering groups around the world is no coincidence

Amongst other recent discoveries, the memristor (a concept from nanoelectronics) is collapsing the boundaries between humans and machines/robots and ushering in an age where humanistic discourse must grapple with cognitive entanglements.

Perceptible only at the level of molecular electronics (nanoelectronics), the memristor was a theoretical concept until 2008. Traditionally in electrical engineering, there are three circuit elements: resistors, inductors, and capacitors. The new circuit element, the memristor, was postulated in a paper by Dr. Leon Chua in 1971 to account for anomalies that had been experienced and described in the literature since the 1950s.

According to Chua’s theory and confirmed by the research team headed by R. Stanley Williams, the memristor remembers how much and when current has been flowing. The memristor is capable of an in-between state similar to certain brain states and this capacity lends itself to learning. As some have described it, the memristor is a synapse on a chip making neural computing a reality and/or the possibility of repairing brains stricken with neurological conditions. In other words, with post-human engineering exploiting discoveries such as the memristor we will have machines/robots that can learn and think and human brains that could incorporate machines.

As Jacques Derrida used the zombie to describe a state that this is neither life nor death as undecidable, the memristor can be described as an agent of transformation conferring robots with the ability to learn (a human trait) thereby rendering them as undecidable, i.e., neither machine nor life. Mirroring its transformative agency in robots, the memristor could also confer the human brain with machine/robot status and undecidability when used for repair or enhancement.

The memristor moves us past Jacques Derrida’s notion of undecidability as largely theoretical to a world where we confront this reality in a type of cognitive entanglement on a daily basis.

You can find the preliminary programme here. My talk is scheduled for Thursday, Oct. 25, 2012 in one of the last sessions for the conference, 11 – 12:30 pm in the Tracing Transhuman Narratives strand.

I do see a few names I recognize, Wickson, Pat (Roy) Mooney and Youtie. I believe Wickson is Fern Wickson from the University of Bergen last mentioned here in a Jul;y 7, 2010 posting about nature, nanotechnology, and metaphors. Pat Roy Mooney is from The ETC Group (an activist or civil society group) and was last mentioned here in my Oct. 7, 2011 posting), and I believe Youtie is Jan Youtie who wss mentioned in my March 29, 2012 posting about nanotechnology, economic impacts, and full life cycle assessments.

The conference (4th annual is upcoming in Oct. 2012) and the Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies are more oriented to folks in the humanities and social sciences. I don’t think they preclude other participants but the topic areas for the conference (which reflects the society’s interests) will tend to appeal to those audiences.

S.NET invites contributions to the Fourth Annual meeting of The Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies (S.NET), to be held at the University of Twente, the Netherlands, on October 22-25, 2012. The four-day conference will assemble scholars, practitioners and policy makers from around the world interested in the development and implications of emerging technologies.

Proposalswill be accepted on the basis of a submitted abstract, which will be refereed. Abstracts must be between 250 and 400 words in length. Proposals for panel sessions should include a general introduction and abstracts of the separate contributions. All proposals should include the strand to which the abstract/panel session is submitted. If an abstract fits more strands, or does not fit the existing strands, simply note that in your submission.

Proposals should be submitted online before April 2, 2012. All submitters will be notified about the results of the review process by the end of May 2012.

Possible themes and topics have been organized into six ‘strands’. While applicants are asked to indicate the strand relevant to the topic of their paper, submissions dealing with themes or topics outside the present strands are also welcome.

1.

R&D practices and the dynamics of new and emerging sciences and technologies

E.g. Research networks & collaborations, emerging research fields, practices of ‘doing’ nano or other emerging fields of science and technology, including historical and philosophical studies of these practices.

2.

Innovation and the use of new and emerging sciences and technologies

E.g. Innovation networks and systems, commercialization, implications for industry structures, translation from lab to practice, application and use of nano-based products and other innovations, critical analyses of growth and consumption, including economic, social and cultural approaches of innovation processes

Visions and cultural imaginaries of newly emerging sciences and technologies

E.g. Promises, expectations, visions, science fiction, imagination, socio-technical change, moral change, role of media, including assessments of such visions and analyses of their role in innovation processes.

5.

Publics and their relations to newly emerging sciences and technologies

E.g. Science communication, risk communication, public engagement, participation and discourses on NEST, science museums, informal science learning initiatives, including critical evaluation of such initiatives and the notion of ‘publics’.

6.

Politics and ethics of newly emerging sciences and technologies

E.g. Responsible innovation, (in)equality, equity, development, global and social distribution of benefits and risks, sustainability, ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ impacts of emerging technologies, including theoretical perspectives on NEST and global developments

Formats

S.NET encourages proposals for individual papers, posters, traditional panels, roundtable discussions and other innovative formats. All proposals for panels, roundtables and other formats, should clearly specify topic, order and timing of the different contributions.

S.NET is the Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies and members will be holding their 3rd annual meeting in Tempe, Arizona from the 7th to the 10th of November 2011 according to Dietram Scheufele’s Jan. 11, 2011 posting on his nanopublic blog (I can’t link directly to the posting but you can find it by scrolling down). From Dietram’s posting,

Invitation. S.NET invites contributions to the Third Annual Meeting of the The Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies (S.NET) to be held in Tempe (Phoenix), Arizona. The workshop will engage diverse scholars, practitioners, and policy makers in the development and implications of emerging technologies.

About S.NET. S.NET is an international association that promotes intellectual exchange and critical inquiry about the advancement of nanoscience and emerging technologies in society. The aim of the association is to advance critical reflection on developments in a broad range of new and emerging fields of science and technology, including, but not limited to, nanoscale science and engineering, biotechnology, synthetic biology, cognitive science, and geoengineering.

Eligibility. S.NET includes diverse communities, viewpoints, and methodologies from across the social sciences and humanities, and welcomes contributions from scientists, engineers, and other practitioners.

To Apply. The program committee (see below) invites submissions from the full breadth of disciplines, methodologies, and epistemologies, as well as from applied, participatory, and practical approaches to studying these emerging fields and from different regional or comparative perspectives. Committed to diverse styles of communication, S.NET welcomes proposals for individual papers, posters, traditional panels, roundtable discussions, and other more innovative formats. In particular, the program committee encourages proposals for topics and formats that will encourage greater dialogue and interaction. Details of the submission process are available online at cns.ucsb.edu/snet2011. All proposals should be submitted online between 1 Feb and 1 March 2011.

Stipends. Travel stipends may be available for US graduate students, and post-doctoral scholars, and non-US participants from the Global South.

I mentioned the 2010 S.Net annual meeting in my Sept. 14, 2010 posting and briefly in my Nov. 8, 2010 posting. In both cases, you will have to scroll down to find the information as the meeting was not the main subject.

Reimagining the prosthetic arm, an article by Cliff Kuang in Fast Company (here) highlights a student design project at New York’s School of Visual Arts. Students were asked to improve prosthetic arms and were given four categories: decorative, playful, utilitarian, and awareness. This one by Tonya Douraghey and Carli Pierce caught my fancy, after all, who hasn’t thought of growing wings? (Rrom the Fast Company website),

Feathered cuff and wing arm

I suggest reading Kuang’s article before heading off to the project website to see more student projects.

At the end of yesterday’s posting about MICA and multidimensional data visualization in spaces with up to 12 dimensions (here) in virtual worlds such as Second Life, I made a comment about multimodal discourse which is something I think will become increasingly important. I’m not sure I can imagine 12 dimensions but I don’t expect that our usual means of visualizing or understanding data are going to be sufficient for the task. Consequently, I’ve been noticing more projects which engage some of our other senses, notably touch. For example, the SIGGRAPH 2009 conference in New Orleans featured a hologram that you can touch. This is another article by Cliff Kuang in Fast Company, Holograms that you can touch and feel. For anyone unfamiliar with SIGGRAPH, the show has introduced a number of important innovations, notably, clickable icons. It’s hard to believe but there was a time when everything was done by keyboard.

Members of the NISE Net Program group and faculty and students at the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University are teaming up to demonstrate and discuss potential collaborations between the social science community and the informal science education community at a conference of the Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies in Seattle in early September.

There’s more at the NISE Net blog here including a link to the conference site. (I gather the Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Nanotechnologies is in its very early stages of organizing so this is a fairly informal call for registrants.)